86 and my brother revealed severa] more. Leopards, who more than lions are satisfied with small and midsize prey, may have become dangerous from scav- enging the people's temporarily un- buried dead. Sometimes, during an epidemic of terrible illness, such as smallpox, all the people of a group would be stricken at the same time. No one would have the strength to bury the dead, and thus the bodies would become available to scavengers. According to J uwa eyewitnesses, the practice of scav- enging seemed to lead leopards into watching camps in which many people were ill and, in a few instances, taking the very ill shortly before death. Possi- bly this habit also led some leopards into entering camps in which no one was ill-something they have done in the past and may still do today, killing people and, if possible, carrying them off. In the most recent episode I know of, which was in 1987, the leopard didn't even wait to choose someone who was asleep but took someone who was sitting by a fire. We didn't hear of anyone's being taken by a leopard in any other way than from a camp at night: no one was dropped on from an overhanging limb; no one was stalked or ambushed while gathering in the bushes or while crouching down to urinate in long grass or while crouch- ing down to get water in the tall, thick reeds that surround some of the waterholes. Leopards everywhere hunt other animals by those methods, and some leopards in other areas hunt peo- ple by those methods. So the restriction of manhunting to campsites at night was apparently a cultural feature of the western - Kalahari leopards-leopards whose traditions went back to epidem- ics of the past. Why didn't the lions do likewise? Didn't they, too, have the opportunity to learn of a possible resource in the camps of sick or sleeping people? Hun- gry lions should by rights refuse noth- ing, and in many places man-eating by lions is well known. Not in the Kalahari, though. Not in that deep and unmolested wilderness No one can explain the truce, because no one understands it. The truce was simply taken for granted, as most situa- tions involving animals are simply tak- en for granted. Animals are assumed to be static in nature. So even today, with both the human and the animal popu- lations stressed and damaged, few peo- ple realize the difference between how things are now and how things once were. D URING the years that we stayed in the Kalahari, we often lived near a waterhole called Gautscha. One of three permanent waterholes in the area, it lay in a rocky outcropping in a thicket of long reeds. For much of the year, Gautscha was the only source of water in nine hundred square miles of very dry country. On a rise of ground a few hundred feet east of the water hole, in the shade of a grove of little trees, the group of J uwa Bushmen camped in shelters made of bent branches sparsely thatched with grass. We camped near- by in tents. To the west of the water hole lay a great clay pan, Gautscha Pan, which formed the bot- tom of a shallow lake during the rains but was a bare, cracked mud flat in the dry season. In a dry bank to the north- west of the pan, perhaps a mile or two from the water hole, were the dens of some spotted hyenas. Somewhere near- by, until someone killed him, lived a brown hyena. On a neighboring grass- land lived a cheetah. In the vast bush southwest of the pan lived a leopard. And in the (to us) featureless bush to the southeast lived a pride of lions. Its size varied, but there were never fewer than ten. We never found the lions' resting places, nor did we try to find them, but we thought we knew where they were, because we sometimes heard lions there in the morning, when lions tend to gather together, and in the evening, when, after a day's rest, lions begin to move around. So in an area of a few square miles lived about thirty people, ten or more lions, a cheetah, a leopard, and at least five hyenas, or approximately fifty large, preda- tory creatures, all of them hunting the same antelope population, all of them drinking from the same waterhole. ti. e.k(.eu e OCTOBER. 15,1990 Helping to minimize the chance of meeting was the habit of the different groups to use the area and its resources at different times-the people and the cheetah by day and the other predators by night. Time of day was particularly important for the people and the lions, because the people needed daylight for hunting and also for gathering, and the lions, who couldn't hope to hunt if they couldn't conceal their large bodies, pre- ferred darkness; the grass was seldom long enough or thick enough to hide them. As one group spread out to forage, the other group would gather together to sleep. Further limiting the chance of meeting was that neither group started the day's or the night's activity quickly. Each group delayed: the lions began their hunting not at dusk, when the people might still be on their way home, but long after dark; the people, on the other hand, delayed leaving their camp until the day was well along, and thus never met the lions- or, for that matter, any nocturnal pred- ator who might be finishing a night's hunt in the dawn. Yet, for all the factors that kept the groups apart, we often did meet the other predators. For instance, we often heard or saw the hyenas. Watching at night by the waterhole, I would see them when they came for a drink. Unlike the hyenas in game parks, these were not used to vehicles, and, eying my jeep with great suspicion, they would stalk around it like cattle who have seen a dog. But they were not shy about visiting us. One night, while poking stealthily around our camp, one of them very cautiously put her head into my little backpacker's tent. I was reading with a flashlight and looked up to see her sensitive nose just inches from my nose. Our eyes met. "What is it?" I asked. Unsure, she drew back. We would also see hyenas when we went by their dens, which had been dug, like caves, into a vertical bank. One hyena, a largf female with breasts, would stand half in, half out of her doorway, watching us with an un- friendly, almost twisted facial expres- sion, as if she found us repugnant. Occasionally, we would see the leop- ard stretched out upon a certain rock, his thighs loosened, sunning his furry white loins. We would often see the head and shoulders of the cheetah above the grass when we went to his flat grassland. But we never, in all the